Canada’s Long Gun Registry

Canada’s Long Gun Registry, If Stephen Harper had his way – which he will when the Conservatives kill Canada’s long-gun registry next week – police in the Victoria suburb of Saanich wouldn’t have been able to solve their big weapons case so quickly.

Seems odd then that just as police were showing off the 159 guns seized from a Saanich home, Green party leader Elizabeth May was rising in the House of Commons this week to fight a desperate rearguard action to save the registry.

Alas for Saanich-Gulf Islands MP May and the police who see the registry as a public safety issue, the data bank is about to be collapsed, its gun-ownership records shredded.

But it’s not as though putting a bullet in the gun registry is an HST-type surprise sprung upon an unsuspecting public.

Getting rid of it was a Conservative election promise, a popular one at that.

Heaven knows the registry, brought to you by the same Liberal government that somehow managed to even turn the sale of medical marijuana into a money-losing proposition, offered a big, fat political target.

It was supposed to cost a mere $1 million when introduced 17 years ago, but ballooned into a $2-billion boondoggle, with critics complaining about ordinary hunters and ranchers being snagged in a bureaucratic net that was meant to catch trigger-happy Toronto gang bangers.

May herself isn’t a big fan. “I’ve got a lot of constituents who are gun users and they hate the registry,” she said from Ottawa. Farmers and sport shooters feel the law treats them like criminals.